Aren't We All a Little "Disenchanted" ... With Life?
The Disney Sequel Worth its Weight in Beans and Pixie Dust
I gave absolutely no shits about yet another Disney sequel making its way into the streaming medium but Disenchanted gave me a few fucks to care about. And for that, I am excited to talk about this movie with you all because this was actually, surprisingly, wonderfully good! I have little to no expectations for sequels (save for Shrek 2, a masterclass in storytelling) so with the hype from the trailer and the track record of its parent studio, I was ready to dismiss this revisit to an animated/live-action Andalasia as another fairytale that should’ve closed its pages on its “Happily Ever After.”
I was happily proven wrong. [God I love being wrong about things. It makes me realize biases in myself I may not have noticed before and it reminds me that I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.]
A Disney sequel long in the making and one that is well-deserved and amazingly put together considering the paltry excuse for sequels many studios have been putting out in recent years:
Disenchanted is literally that one song that talks about how some girl who grew up is now mad at Disney for making her believe in fairytale endings. Only to realize that those endings are really only the beginnings of what is really life.
This movie follows Giselle (Amy Adams) as she tries to make her fairytale ending a staple of everyday life and slowly realizes that that can’t always be the case. Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino) and Robert (Patrick Dempsey) are more than accommodating to their doting (step) mother but suffer the most from her eccentricities and lack of spatial/mortal/normal awareness.
A wish gone wrong made in the best of interests of all and the hope to make everyone happy, fairytale tropes we know and expect— served on a plate with a little bit of spice, and the realization (yet again) that fairytale endings are all a fucking lie. That, and the tropes Giselle falls into so accidentally hard, makes this a refreshing sequel.
One of the best things about this movie is that I expected all the things that happened to happen. But it did so in an interesting way. The setup was there and slightly obvious but I knew to expect a payoff BUT how they did it, when, and where is what made it watchable.
All of which is the bread and butter of a franchise-induced and sequalized Hollywood, which has as of late been serving sequels on flaccid bread with cold butter haphazardly slapped on.
Giselle fucks up. She fucks up so bad there is literally no way she should’ve been able to magic her way out of this one, but yknow what? It pays off in exactly the way you expect: with a wand, with her daughter, and with a wish.
Nostalgia and Memories
It is a boon and a bane to have a history.
The expectation from things done before, the knowledge of how things were previously, the reassurance that this is okay because it has been tried and true.
Recognizing a memory and fanning the hearth of remembering allows a warm and friendly glow in our heart of hearts. Similarly, projecting that nostalgia to an experience and being disappointed is the other course of action that often comes about when we see something familiar and have expectations that are not met.
That is the main problem with retelling fairytales: regardless of if it’s a modern tale or something Hans Christen Anderson scribbled out centuries ago, we have expectations. In the tapestry of storytelling, to reuse stories and tropes is not only accepted but expected. It is how it is done that makes all the difference in the world and opens the doors of fame and longevity or drops one into the dumbwaiter of obscurity.
Memories, the good and the bad and how we choose to accept them is a recurring, important theme of this movie. With the memories that Giselle has from her first movie and the interim to this one, as well as our memories of how this kind of fairytale ends, makes every scene nostalgic. Not over-the-top or tiresome in its retelling, but subtle and familiar so that finding little Easter eggs is more a surprise and a happy discovery than a shoved-in-your-face reminder that you’re rewatching a fairytale for the umpteenth time to feel any modicum of happiness :’)
This movie plays a lot with nostalgia, obviously calling back to its original 2012 story of a similar name but as well as fairytale tropes we are agonizingly familiar with, considering the influx of fairytale dramatizations saturating the western media market.
But it handles that nostalgia with light brushstrokes and twists Giselle’s Cinderella ending in just a fantastical way that it is unbelievable yet familiar. It balances its original story well with the use of old tropes and that cocktail mix is one I will tip back to end my hard fought sobriety.
Intertextuality With Fairytales; Specifically Disney Princesses/Stories
When the fairytale world seeps into reality, we see deliberate nods to Disney’s other midnight-crushing princesses (and even a cameo from the original actress of Morgan: Rachel Covey!). The stepmother trope is an obvious one that we see, but we observe its subtle change as Giselle fights the power of the trope.
There is also the “before midnight” trope, a silly nod to the step sisters in Rosaleen (Yvette Nicole Brown) and Ruby (Jayma Mays), Robert as the knightly love interest battling dragons and adventuring (and absolutely failing, the mad lad), the assumed evil within felines, Sleeping Beauty’s fairy guardians, and (my favorite!) love being the most potent thing of all.
Cliche, I know. But I’m a slut for love solving everything.
When Prince Edward (James Marsden) and Nancy (Idina Menzel) gift a wishing wand to Giselle’s newborn and claim only a daughter of Andalasia could use it, and then we get a quick cut to Morgan’s flickering eyes, I fucking knew the solution to whatever problem would be with her and our chosen loved ones.
Because thematically, this movie is and always has been about finding families in our happy endings.
There is an intertextuality that I appreciate a lot more in this movie than in any Marvel movie. It’s probably (definitely) because I haven’t spent 60+ hours watching every single movie in the MCU and its subsequent television spinoffs and the comics have such a wide reach to say I am aware of their Easter eggs would be like saying I read the Bible (I haven’t. I tried. I got through Genesis.)
I like fairytales. The Brothers Grimm, Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Aesop’s Fables, Shakespeare and Co. doing so much for our established worldview on storytelling. Seeing those props that have been established by the masters used in this medium and with enough of a twist to make it their own is why I enjoyed this movie.
How many other fairytale tropes did I miss? Any worth sharing?
Parallel of Tropes: Be Careful What You Wish For and Redemption
Disenchanted follows the Disneyfied version of Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, with all the tropes neatly packaged and delivered to our screens. The added symbols of other Disney tales does more to add a smirk to our faces than it does to radically push forward the story in quick cuts and racked focuses.
This is the classic story of “be careful what you wish for” (with Giselle unwillingly fulfilling the evil stepmother trope when she wishes for a fairytale life) and I am not disappointed. The villain scene with Giselle and Maya Rudolph is a phenomenal piece of art that needs to be sung for its split screen design, choreography, and contrasting color palettes. Who said a fairytale couldn’t have more than one villain?
The music and the scenes for “Badder” highlights villainous symbolism and how Giselle is only a few notches away from being badder than bad. It picks an upbeat, jazzy melody— one you’d find in a seedy film noir barscape.
The lyrics are obviously working to push the story forward but it also parodies the idea of a dual villain in a fairytale (and other fairytales while we’re at it) as Malvina Monroe (Maya Rudolph), the obvious villain, is pitted immediately against our supposed heroine, Giselle.
The colors contrast, the scenes cut back and forth to show their similarities, each self-proclaimed villainess stares straight into the camera at points since this is their (technical) villain monologue.
It is fricken’ hilarious when characters are self-aware, and that is what these characters are. They are self-aware enough that they can abuse the tropes, and while we’ve seen this happen before, it’s always interesting to see how the creators and the actors handle it.
At the end of it all we get redemption. Despite feeling like a shitty copout ending since there are no consequences to this cautionary tale, it at least shows how unfairytale-like Enchanted was and therefore how realistic this one is: happy endings are things you have to constantly work on.
The end.